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Al-Sistani calls for 'yes' vote

Iraq's revered top Shia cleric Ayat Allah Ali al-Sistani has called on Iraqis to approve the new constitution after political leaders agreed on amendments aimed at winning the backing of the Sunni Arab minority.

"Anyone who contacts the grand ayatollah's office is told that he instructs Iraqis to vote 'yes'" in Saturday's crucial vote, said an official from his office in the Shia holy city of Najaf.

Al-Sistani, who rarely speaks in public, was one of the driving forces behind the landmark January elections that saw the majority Shia community and secular Kurds head Iraq's new parliament.

Political leaders announced on Wednesday some modifications to the constitution and an agreement to consider further revisions after new elections in December to try to win over the Sunni Arabs, who make up about 20% of the population.

"The Iraqi faithful must go to the polling stations to vote in favour of the test after the changes approved on Wednesday which eliminate all the arguments" against the constitution, said Sayed Ahmed Safi, an al-Sistani representative in the holy city of Karbala.

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source: aljazeera

A United Nations human rights investigator has accused the US and British forces in Iraq of breaching international law by depriving civilians of food and water in besieged cities.

But the US military denied the charge and said that while supplies were sometimes disrupted by combat, food was never deliberately withheld.


Jean Ziegler, a former Swiss sociology professor who is UN special rapporteur on the right to food, said on Friday that the Geneva Conventions banned military forces from using "starvation of civilians as a method of warfare".


But he said that in Falluja, Tal Afar and Samarra, Iraqi and US-led forces had cut off or restricted food and water to encourage residents to flee before assaults on entrenched Sunni fighters over the past year.


"A drama is taking place in total silence in Iraq, where the coalition's occupying forces are using hunger and deprivation of water as a weapon of war against the civilian population," Ziegler told a news briefing in Geneva.


Geneva Conventions

Two 1977 protocols to the 1949 Geneva Conventions, which lay down rules of conduct in armed conflicts, ban using deprivation of food or water as a weapon of war. They also prohibit destruction of food stocks or interruption of food supply lines.


Ziegler said he understood the military rationale of the US-led forces that were "facing such a horrible enemy - these insurgents who do not respect any law of war and who use the civilian population of cities like Falluja or Tal Afar as human shields, who keep them as hostages".


But he said their actions were nevertheless a "flagrant violation of international humanitarian law".


Ziegler said he hoped the General Assembly would "condemn this strategy of the coalition forces" when he presents his report on the right to food in New York on 27 October.

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A group of US soldiers who had just returned from Afghanistan and Iraq called US President George Bush "a liar and a cheat."
The soldiers are angry and disappointed with what they said were Bush's failure to comply with his promises.

The soldiers were recruited by the US Army with promises of being granted interest-free loans to purchase houses after a 15-month service.

The troops said the Bush administration never honored any of its promises.

The US Army is stacked with soldiers having economic problems or prisoners sent on dangerous missions outside the country. Over the past decades it has used such persons to fight wars, including in Vietnam.

US administrations hardly give attention to the demands of US soldiers, some of whom are war veterans.

Society analysts believe the soldiers would be among the major problems of US society in the future.

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Saddam took a beating for insulting holy men of Islam
By Anton La Guardia, Diplomatic Editor
(Filed: 17/11/2005)

Saddam Hussein was beaten up while he was being interrogated by a judge after he insulted two of the most revered figures in Shia Islam, it emerged yesterday.

According to an Iraqi lawyer close to the current government in Baghdad, the altercation took place in July while Saddam was being investigated ahead of his war crimes trial, which opened last month.

The dictator was apparently being questioned about the brutal suppression of a Shia uprising in 1991, after his defeat in the war to expel his forces from Kuwait.

Saddam admitted helicopters were used to fire on civilians in the city of Karbala, arguing that they were targeting the armed opposition.

Asked whether the shrines of the Imams Hussein and Abbas in the city had been attacked by Iraqi forces, Saddam at first pretended not to know the two holy figures of Shia Islam.

But he then said: "Who do you mean? Those manayich [buggers]?" According to the Iraqi lawyer, two of the court's clerks who had been taking notes then lunged at the former dictator and started to punch him.



Saddam fought back until the judge succeeded in restoring order, but not before the ex-dictator's head was bruised. US guards posted outside the makeshift courthouse in Baghdad found the incident amusing and did not intervene, the lawyer claimed.

Rumours of the punch-up had circulated in the past, and for a while Saddam's defence lawyers refused to co-operate with the court in protest at the alleged assault.

The Iraqi special tribunal at the time denied the accusation. But the latest details were published yesterday by the AFP news agency, quoting "an Iraqi lawyer briefed by investigative judges in the Iraqi High Tribunal".

He said Saddam was being "co-operative, so long as the judges treat him with respect".

The Saddam trial is due to resume on Nov 28, though his defence team is demanding that the venue be moved abroad after a series of deaths and attacks.

source: telegraph.co.uk